anime-ness and the halo of time

I always feel that Liszt’s late works carry a strange aura. Sometimes I want to call it a kind of “fanfiction quality”, though of course that’s just a casual term when I don’t know what else to use — what I mean to borrow from “fanfiction” is precisely its way of extracting historical elements and then openly, thoroughly transforming them into something non-historical. An example might be Via crucis, with its evocation of modal chant and its peculiar piano accompaniment (which, to me, feels far more fitting than the organ version*). In fact, Liszt’s late music is suffused with a kind of anachronistic air, which makes it almost the best kind of anime music.

* Here I should note: this is actually me imposing a preconceived idea, misinterpreting Liszt’s intentions. In an 1884 letter to his publisher, Liszt clearly emphasized that Via crucis, among other works, was best accompanied by organ or harmonium. But theoretically, this doesn’t affect what follows — just as, later on, explaining anime’s traits from the perspective of commercial production also doesn’t invalidate the arguments being made.

So what does this mean? First of all, it simply means I feel that some anime seem perfectly suited to such music, whereas in film it would feel awkward. But when I say “anime music,” I don’t mean the music of any particular anime, nor any composer’s specific idea of anime scoring (a composer might also write film scores and not see much difference). What I mean is the kind of music that, when it appears in anime, fuses with the overall concept of anime itself. Thus, this has to do with the very nature of anime.

For instance, suppose an anime features religious elements — we can be almost certain it’s not really engaging with theology, nor with anything connected to real religion or philosophy of religion. Instead, it expresses a kind of pure, imaginary “faith,” marked by anachronism (or a surface-level deliberate naivety). And this doesn’t just apply to religion: the same goes for contracts, rules, and similar things that often appear in anime; in fact, the music functions in the same way. If this were placed in film, however, it would likely feel wholly unserious, like mere “cosplay.” When it comes to matters of belief, “cosplay” is usually meant as a derogatory word; but when discussing anime, people generally avoid making such judgments, unless they want to dogmatically dismiss all anime as frivolous works. Of course, some do judge along these lines, for example by explaining that such features inevitably arise from the logic of targeting a specific audience, hence from commercial production. But ultimately, the purpose of such arguments is to conclude that these things are not interesting, because they are “mechanically produced.” What we’re concerned with here, however, is precisely their interestingness — even if they are “mechanically produced.”

Liszt incorporates a hymn (though we should note, the way he treated it in this work is not really the way chant is usually treated) against an “anachronistic” piano accompaniment — something clearly impossible for “film scoring” to pull off, but something I can only imagine “anime scoring” doing quite naturally. For this kind of “anachronistic/deliberately naïve” collage is itself a feature of anime music; and it is not even a fully self-conscious gesture, not like Shibuya-kei music that deliberately identifies itself as a clear semantic element. In fact, the piano writing in Liszt’s sacred chamber works carries with it a shimmering halo of time. From the “ancient” the work gestures toward (though not any real, specific ancient past), to the present in which the work exists while quietly pretending it doesn’t belong there (yet without really trying to conceal itself, without desperately transforming into a “genuine ancient work”), time seeps across the writing for piano and choir. Every step of the work — however quiet and careful — inevitably lands upon some place that resonates with reality: on the footsteps of dances, bravura preludes, ballades, salon songs. However much these forms are slowed down, diluted, or dimmed, they still faintly remain, because it is they that constitute history. And Liszt, like us, was a man within history — only he chose to situate himself in a kind of hushed interstice, as if attempting to cook without rice. This thin atmosphere is needed for the halo to appear; and if we think, for example, of the passacaglia-style finale of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, we feel it is saturated with the color of its present, radiant with brilliance, and that any halo within it has of course become entirely invisible.

This is just like anime music. Even when it tells of a fantasy world, it always carries the halo of our history. The crucial point is that this halo is entirely idle, unoccupied. Precisely because of this shimmering, feather-light — even embarrassingly light — quality, the concept of the “serious” has already completely transformed in Liszt’s late works. For this reason, they go beyond the original framework of “music that evokes history,” and even become a kind of music of the future.

Another point — [if we set aside for a moment the aspect of historical writing] — is this also saying: “you can’t write too well”? If you could write at the level of mature Mozart*, such music would probably be unsuitable in anime. Of course, “well” must be placed in quotation marks: there is no need to assume that Mozart occupies some higher plane than anime. Sometimes anime music seems, at first glance, to carry a certain vulgarity - but that is actually its secret; if you were to insert Mozart, then it would really become vulgar, because then there would be no effective link between layers, and Mozart would merely be consumed as a symbol. This is not to reject the use of classical music - but its “classical-ness” must not be something considered as a factor. Just like in The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, where Bach’s First Brandenburg Concerto Adagio is used: in that moment, I even felt as if the Brandenburg was written precisely for that scene…

* In this passage, I seem to be mixing things up. According to the earlier discussion, Mozart may be unsuitable for anime not because his music is “too good,” but because (as genuinely ancient music in contemporary ears) its way of handling history conflicts with the nature of anime. Seen this way, the earlier phrase “too good” should really be written as “too close to historical reality.” But what I wanted to discuss afterward was perhaps the non-historical sense of “good” or “bad”… That line of thought never developed further. Perhaps because the subject is more difficult — or more ambiguous. Still, it is of course worth thinking about.